Transcript: Benjamin Carlson

An interview with the American writer and media strategist

Canada is embroiled in a number of high-profile political scandals, and it’s a dispiriting moment for the country. This week, we’re taking a break from the news cycle, and instead contemplating the contributions of a famed Canadian — the late philosopher Marshall McLuhan — who, my guest on the program says, understood our time better than many currently living through it. 

Benjamin Carlson is an American writer, and media strategist, and the author of the Substack newsletter, Carlson Letter. His latest essay, on Marshall McLuhan, is part of a series at The Free Press titled “The Prophets.” 

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: Your recent essay at The Free Press, about the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, has gotten a lot of attention. It has come at a perfect moment for some of us in Canada. We are currently embroiled in a number of political scandals, and it's a bit of a draining moment for the country. So, it's nice to be reminded of one of the great Canadians in our history — and the impact that he has had. As you noted online, it's also a refreshing break from the news cycle for a lot of others. You came across McLuhan last year on YouTube, and he immediately grabbed your interest. What did you find most compelling about his thinking?

BC: What struck me was that McLuhan seemed to be reaching through the screen and talking to my own interests, and what I think relates to a lot of people these days on how social media is affecting us. The amazing thing is that these recordings were made in the 70s or in some cases the 60s. Not only social media, but not even the Internet existed at the time. That uncanny feeling that he was seeing through time to our current condition captivated me.

TH: For listeners who may not be aware, can you give us a brief snapshot of his biography? He has an unusual history for a technologist.

BC: He does. Marshall McLuhan was born in Western Canada. He was born into a family with a mother who was a performing artist — she was an elocutionist, which at the time was in fact a lively art — and a father in real estate. He had an interest early on in literature. He became a PhD and eventually an English professor, focused on originally some Elizabethan poets and then later on modernist poets. He would analyze the formal qualities of poetry. Which means not so much what is a poem talking about, but what exactly is the structure that it follows? Well, those techniques he used, he ended up applying to the world of change, the world of technology, the world of tools. And that transition happened for him when he was exposed to some other Canadian scholars in Toronto.

Harold Innis was the one who I think was most instrumental in drawing his attention to technology as a whole. There were others who informed him, particularly on the different moments in human history when we went from spoken language to written text. And this led his mind down the path of thinking about how everything we use, particularly communications technologies — but not only communications — including roads and satellites, how that changes us. Not because of what is said, but more because the device itself, the medium itself, changes the way we think, the way we experience, the way we feel, the way we relate to one another. That's where his phrase, “the medium is the message” really came from.

TH: Last year, you tweeted a clip from one of his interviews in 1977, discussing CIA and FBI surveillance. You noted at the time that it was one of “the most mind-bending riffs on identity in the digital age” that you had ever heard. A lot of people agreed. It got millions of views on Twitter, and it was interacted with by both Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk. You write in your essay that McLuhan “understood, with a poet's intuition, the effects of the electronic age on human psychology.” Walk us through what McLuhan said in that video about living outside of our bodies — and why you think it proved so engaging to so many people.

BC: He is on an interview show, it's a Canadian program. They're talking about, initially, intelligence. And then he goes on this little tangent. Over the course of about 30 seconds, he says, “Everybody has become porous. They've got the light, and the messages go right through us. By the way, at this moment, we are on the air.” And this includes you and me, Tara. 

“On the air, we do not have any physical body. When you're on the telephone or on radio or on TV, you don't have a physical body. You're just an image on the air. When you don't have a physical body, you're a discarnate being. You have a very different relation to the world around you. This, I think, has been one of the big effects of the electric age. It has deprived people, really, of their private identity … Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.” I got chills the first time I heard that. I don't know how you feel.

TH: I'm getting chills right now, listening to you read it.

BC: So, the experience that you just had, and that I had reading it now, is that feeling of living in a world of moving images. Yes, of course he's on broadcast TV, he's literally on the air, in a sense. Now, that's our everyday reality, and our every hour, every minute reality. That makes us, I think, feel even more viscerally this idea that so much of our lives are experienced in a disembodied way now. We're in our heads, we're perceiving through our eyes, we're looking at little glowing rectangles of various sizes for most of our waking hours — and that tends to make us less aware of the sense of feel, the sense of smell. All of these things that otherwise give our body information about where we are and how we're dealing with the world. That was McLuhan, decades ago, realizing just how fundamental the shift was. Very, very few people that I've ever come across saw it as clearly. Even today. And this was long before this change even took place.

TH: He also says that one of the big marks of the loss of identity, of that private identity, that kind of internal world, is nostalgia. I certainly relate to that. I'm Gen X and I feel so much nostalgia for the era before the Internet. What that felt like, on a visceral level, day to day. What was your reaction to that particular thread?

BC: I had a similar feeling. It also made me appreciate at a meta level what I was doing. Which is sharing a clip that took people back to a simpler era of media. When people talk like that — granted this is a mind-blowing sentiment — but there’s full sentences, he's given space to develop an elaborate thought. Of course, podcasts might be different now, but on TV you don't see that. Nostalgia itself was a factor in everybody enjoying this clip of Marshall McLuhan talking about nostalgia. In addition to that, after I started to go down this path of learning about McLuhan, he talks about how the content of any medium is, partly because of nostalgia, the previous one. 

So for example, what was television? It was radio brought to life. So you'd have radio programs that come on to TV. Okay, well what was I doing on Twitter? I was taking TV, or I was taking YouTube, but taking the content of the previous medium and bringing it forward. And that's nostalgia at work. That's just human dynamics. He observed that about communications and technological evolutions long ago. So whatever comes next, whatever AI is, it's probably going to be nostalgic about this era of social media, Facebook and Twitter. That's just the nature of how content and technology evolves.

TH: It's so interesting. At the beginning of that same interview that you clipped, McLuhan spoke of the global village, a term he coined in the 1950s. He thought that we were going backwards into a collective mind that was tribal and without any kind of individual consciousness, characterized by what he described as a “savage impatience with others.” When you heard him say that line, what went through your mind?